Monthly Archives: September 2018

If you’re a regular reader here at the not-so-hallowed halls of Brian of Morbius, you will notice that one particular category has been somewhat neglected of late. The videos tab hasn’t seen any action in months. I used to do a separate blog entry for every video I created. Extensive notes on the genesis, making-of process and public reaction. Some of them ran to over a thousand words.

I don’t get time anymore. Part of it is actually having the time but having more worthwhile things to fill it with. I used to chip away at paragraphs when I was supposed to be working, during the quiet moments or the hours I simply couldn’t face doing that report. It was irresponsible and dishonest and it’s a miracle I didn’t get caught. These days I’ll vacuum the lounge. Well, when you have four kids and you had rice the previous evening, it’s the only way to stop things growing on the carpet.

The long and the short of it is that we’ve had a bunch of stuff appearing on YouTube over the last few months and most of it hasn’t even got a mention. If I were of a mind to do so, I’d give each video its own separate entry, the way I used to. But I have another book to start and in any case we’re about to get crazy with series 11. So a two-part digest – with a couple of paragraphs’ commentary for each video – is all you get, and will probably make for a better piece as a result.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy turned forty this year. We’re the same age, although we don’t share a birthday. Everyone has their own favourite iteration of Douglas Adams’ magnum opus, although no one likes the film very much; even two famous Bills (Nighy and Bailey) and the great Alan Rickman weren’t enough to save it from desperate mediocrity. But the TV series is still quite wonderful, as I found out when I watched it again recently with the kids. Joshua has this year finished the quintet and has even attempted to read And Another Thing, the Eoin Colfer-penned follow-up that nobody asked for and comparatively few people enjoyed.

Somewhere along the line I thought it would be fun to drop Eddie, the ship’s computer, into ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ as a replacement for House. I know I didn’t come up with the idea for this all by myself. It may or may not have been one of those group posts where I asked people for help, which is what happens when I get stuck. I genuinely can’t remember. Sadly the end result is a disaster. It’s clunky and disjointed and Eddie’s dialogue really doesn’t work; it feels enjambed, like the worst bits of Moffat’s dialogue. The bit where Amy is kneeling over Rory’s corpse and the computer is singing? Yeuch. Horrible. What the hell was I thinking? It’s worse than the Star Wars Holiday Special; I ought to pulp it from existence.

For the most part, backwards videos are a quick fix: they come about when I have a pressing need to do something but comparatively little time. You just run the score free dialogue track through semi-decent audio editing software and then sync it with the muted video, and then cut and paste as you see fit. You don’t even have to worry about copyright infringement, providing you’re using rights-free background music, and there’s plenty of that hanging around.

Every time I do a backwards video someone brings up the bloody Twin Peaks thing, and so on this occasion I set out to do something that was as David Lynch as…well all right, it’s not really David Lynch, but it’s a good deal more David Lynch than some of my other stuff. This isn’t an isolated scene, more a carefully arranged sequence (yes, sometimes there is actually some thought involved in these things) that spans the entire episode, from the opening Scooby Doo reference to Elton’s closing monologue. The end result is, I hope, a little bit spooky – or at least weird; weird is acceptable middle ground. I adore ‘Love And Monsters’, which gets trashed for all the wrong reasons, but various people who didn’t like it have cited this as an improvement, so I guess that’s a win.

3. May: Peppa Pig Still Can’t Whistle

We don’t watch Peppa Pig in our house. It’s not a protest or anything. We just can’t get Channel 5. In any case, iPlayer keeps everyone busy and I can do without accidentally running into the ridiculous travesty that is Thomas The Tank Engine. But even I couldn’t avoid this, which went all over BuzzFeed (no, I’m not linking; they don’t need the traffic) – the Peppa episode that has Peppa grousing that she can’t whistle, before hanging up on Suzie (who can) in spectacular style. The clip went viral, and the animated GIFs were used as a reaction for just about everything. My initial thoughts were to have Peppa call the Eleventh Doctor, but as it turns out this conversation with Donna (actually two, if you look carefully) from the 2008 Sontaran episodes fitted perfectly. Oink.

4. June: Fraggle Rock

This is exactly what it says on the tin. I hadn’t done an intro sequence for what felt like ages, and when someone posted the opening credits to Jim Henson’s 1980s classic on Facebook I noticed that an awful lot of it consisted of Gobo running down up and down corridors. Something clicked, and the rest was easy. Not to blow my own air horn too much, but I have to say I’m quite proud of this one.

Here is a public service announcement: the following piece contains some strong language, and is also a bit of a rant.

Today, folks, we’re exploring fandom. It’s something I do quite a lot, probably too much, but the mysterious duplicity of it has long interested me. It is a source of both fascination and revulsion; a complicated hotbed of passion and devotion and hatred, a twisted car crash of a thing. Because sometimes fandom gets ugly. In a world of extremes it is the best and the worst of us.

If you’ve been around social media in the past week chances are you’ve run into this story, so I won’t recount it in detail, although the screen grabs are reproduced below. It tells the tale of an unpleasant encounter at SuperCon, which is apparently in Florida, although that was new information. It was posted by someone called valeria2067; I haven’t bothered looking her up. I don’t think it would make a difference in this case. She was approached by an older man at the food court – to be specific, her eleven-year-old daughter was – not long after they’d both met Peter Capaldi. I’ll let valeria take it from here.

As a journalist I have learned to read and report between the lines. You never get the full story; there are words left off the transcript, missing dates, unrecounted deeds. It’s very easy to read a single source and assume you have the full picture, or to read something emotive and feel exactly what you are expected to feel. I have – for reasons I don’t care to unpack – experienced this at close hand these past few months, with half-stories blown out of proportion, vital information left scandalously unreported. The other side is less interesting and therefore ignored, but it is no less worthy. There is is a crack in everything: that’s where the truth gets in.

So I have been turning this story over and over in my head, trying desperately to envisage a scenario in which this conversation may be the clumsily phrased small talk of a socially inept but nonetheless well-intentioned older man. This has nothing to do with apologetics, or gender defence. I just get angry when people jump to conclusions. There is a mob mentality about the world right now: this need for clear heroes and despicable villains. Did you ever see Titanic? Do you remember how Billy Zane played a narcissistic sociopath who was utterly one-dimensional, purely so we could applaud Kate Winslet for cheating on him? That’s kind of the way things are now. It is not enough for Donald Trump to be incompetent, he has to be downright evil as well. (He may be both, of course. Actually he probably is. I’m sure this was going somewhere.)

No, the truth is not the brilliant light of clarity but the murky grey of ambivalence. Perhaps this woman is not reporting the conversation as it happened – there are missing lines of dialogue, crucial game-changing giveaways that didn’t make the transcript. We’ll be here all day if we start down that road, so for the sake of the argument (and because I instinctively want to trust her) let’s assume that what she’s written down is what was said. Perhaps she overreacted. Perhaps the guy was being genuinely friendly, and just phrased his questions with the sort of awkwardness that comes from watching too much TV and conducting the bulk of your conversations over social media, where you get time to change a sentence before anybody gets to see or hear it. Years ago a friend of mine suggested a dystopian novel in which the internet crashes and millions of people find it impossible to engage in real-world dialogue because they’ve forgotten how, leaving a bunch of Luddites to rise up and take control of everything. I’m still waiting for her to write it; if she doesn’t I may pinch the idea myself.

That’s the sort of thing I could almost envisage happening here. Someone who is nice, but who doesn’t know how to talk to kids. Could that be what’s happened, perhaps? A nice man who wasn’t gatekeeping at all, but who was just trying to talk to a younger fan because he was lonely and none of the girls were interested? So I went through this woman’s post and picked it apart and tried to find the weak spots, the moments she built up a defensive wall, perhaps because of past experience, the inconsistencies, the nuances of assumed guilt that may have spawned from reading a situation in the wrong way.

And guess what? I found nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip.

Because there is no excuse for this man’s behaviour. None. This isn’t a nice guy engaging in an awkward conversation because he doesn’t know how to have a sensible one. This is a gatekeeping dickwad. There is no “other side” to this story, no get-out clause in the face of agenda setting. This is someone who makes the rest of us looks bad – not because he expresses his appreciation for a common interest through reprehensible behaviour, but because through our actions we have helped to create him.

Let’s start with the opening gambit: “Do you even know anything about Doctor Who?” That’s not how you start small talk. That’s a straight-up rhetorical question. That assumes lack of knowledge, based in all likelihood on age, gender and costume choice. He saw a kid meeting the Twelfth Doctor and instantly assessed her worth as a fan. It is value judgement central. It is an inappropriate way to begin a conversation with an adult; for a child it is unforgivable. This is not Alec Guinness diplomatically pleading with a child to watch something other than Star Wars, only for the conversation to be irrevocably warped by thirty years of Chinese whispers. This is just rudeness, plain and unambiguous.

I have no doubt that this man’s choices were marked by his engagement of and experience with younger members of the fanbase. There is a skewed bias towards Nu Who among the discussion groups because it is accessible and contemporary and frankly easier on the eyes than some of the old stuff. There is no point getting grumpy about it. No doubt this grizzled veteran is sick of the Best Doctor polls that routinely run in Facebook groups and online publications, in which Tennant is usually at the top. That’s what happens with polls. They’re filled out by a selective audience. Years ago there were two X-Factor finalists, and the less objectively talented one emerged victorious because he was younger, prettier and Scottish. That’s the way of things. It’s a karaoke competition; we move on.

Having assumed a lack of knowledge, he then fires off a list of questions, the sort of thing you get asked when you apply to join certain groups. When requested to stop, he attempts to justify himself, and fails simply because his cause is rooted in snobbery. How dare you, whispers the subtext behind every question, how dare you bring your daughter up as a fan without doing it the way I would? There is a sense of elitism about it: that certain Doctors are more worth your time, that if you don’t know this or you haven’t seen that then you’re not watching the show properly. The words ‘True Whovian’ are flung about by experienced and fresh and young and old alike, and they mean nothing and should be banned from usage full stop. (I don’t like the word ‘Whovian’ generally, actually, but let’s not go there just now.) Everyone sets the bar in a different place and thus the entire concept is meaningless – her idea of appropriate dedication is different to yours, so how come you get to be right and she doesn’t? It’s patently ludicrous. A fan is a fan regardless of whether they’ve seen only one series or [Googles] all thirty-seven.

Sometimes newer fans make mistakes, but that’s not an excuse for beating them over the head. Listen: uber-fandom is not a fucking badge of honour. There is nothing noble, nothing venerable, about knowing more than everyone else. It makes you a handy person to have on a pub quiz team, but that’s it. Gareth – yes, we’re still in touch – has forgotten more about Doctor Who than I’m ever likely to know, but do you think I spend hours emailing him purely because he knows things? He has seen and read just about everything pre-‘Robot of Sherwood’ (which is where he lost all interest) but he doesn’t brag about it. He answers questions when I ask him for help – usually with something I’m writing – but he has never set himself up as a source of all knowledge, and has never lorded it over me, because if he did I wouldn’t be talking to him.

Let’s move down the chain. I know more than many of the people I talk to online, largely because of the kind of groups in which I’ve made a home for myself. That in itself is nothing to be proud of. I use my knowledge to help people when they need it. Usually they’re polite. When they dig their heels in or are unpleasant, that’s when I get scornful. But I remember what it was like to know nothing. I remember hanging out with a bunch of Who fans in Cambridge and asking them about stories I’d never seen. There was no arrogance in their answers, no sense of superiority. They just told me what I needed to know. They were nice. Did you ever think there’s a place for that? Maybe we’re just not very nice these days, simply because there’s no time. We use our love of the show as a defence. Who cares how you treat other people, as long as Doctor Who is left untarnished?

Do I think Davison was better than Eccleston? Undoubtedly. Do I care that other people don’t? Not in the least. If someone thinks Tennant’s final episode was moving, then that’s fine. If they proclaim him as “the greatest Doctor ever” without having seen Pertwee, or Troughton, or Baker, I’ll probably say “That’s fair enough, I’m glad you like him, but have you considered watching…?”. But I’ll do so politely and in an appropriate context. I wouldn’t say it to an eleven-year-old. Or if I did, I certainly wouldn’t start a conversation with it, particularly when it was someone I didn’t know. I don’t even do it with my own children. Daniel is nine and has seen all the new stories and a few of the old. Tennant is his favourite. I don’t care. I have known wise twelve-year-olds who have memorised entire sequences from ‘The Dominators’; I have known octogenarians who got into the show in 2005. Age is irrelevant.

There is one thing we haven’t discussed, and that’s the possibility of learning difficulties. Thomas started secondary school the other week; his transition days in July proceeded mostly without incident although there was one run-in with a senior member of staff who assumed (incorrectly) that he and another boy with similar issues were being rude, merely because they phrased something rather differently to the way you would expect from someone who was neurotypical (or allistic, or whatever I’m allowed to say now). Basically he forgot about the autism; I’m keeping an eye on things. Is there a possibility this man had Asperger’s? The way the story is recounted – particularly in terms of his body language – it’s doubtful. Do we let him off the hook if he does? Yes, we probably do. But I don’t think it’s a factor. I’ve spent over a decade dealing with autism on a daily basis, and I’m not picking up any of the signs; there are no alarm bells ringing.

I don’t get angry too much these days. My list of pet peeves is a litany of small things. “I loathe burnt toast,” says McCoy, before reminiscing about bus stations. I get angry with tailgaters. Nuisance calls and scammers targeting old people are another target. There’s not much else. People on the internet make me sad, but that’s the way people are when they can say what they like without consequences. You shake your head and hug your family, and think no more on it.

But for one reason or another, this has made my blood boil. This is not the way the world should be. As fans, we need to do better. As men, we need to do better. As so-called adults, we need to do better. I don’t believe (and have never believed) that the message of Doctor Who is kindness, but it’s a lesson we could nonetheless do with learning. I saw it this morning: a new user started a thread in a group asking about numbering, and the response from the rest of the group was to troll him with GIFs and sarcastic comments. Not one of them, it seemed, stopped to consider that perhaps he was simply confused. There are others who start conversations saying how much they love Clara. They are trolled and ridiculed. And these same people, those doing the scoffing and jeering, are the ones ranting about conversations like the one Valeria experienced at SuperCon. Even I’m doing it – taking the moral high ground when I know that my behaviour online is often less than exemplary. Perhaps we should be cleaning our own house, ere we cast a broom round the kitchens of others.

Still. To the guy who did this? I know you’ve probably read all manner of unpleasantness in the last few days, and have languished in obscurity, desperate to come out and clear your name (as you consider it) but daring not to because of the abuse you’ll undoubtedly receive. I have a funny feeling the bulk of your critics will be women, because the rebuttals and defences I’ve encountered have been from men. But I do not want to turn this into a gender-based argument, because this is as much about the culture of fandom as it is about anything else. I could envisage an identical situation where you would have approached a small boy and treated him in the same manner; I suspect that your conscious decision was to practice age-based gatekeeping, but that you saw this girl as an easy target.

Gender isn’t the be-all and end-all, but it is a factor. So as a man myself, I say this. Shame on you. Shame on you for assuming your loyalty gives you a stake, an ownership, or any say at all in how other fans engage with your pet obsession. Shame on you for thinking you can dictate terms of fandom. Shame on you, and shame on us all, men and women and fans and non-fans alike, for breeding the sort of culture where we allow this to happen.

For weeks we’ve been hanging about for new footage. Or images. It’s sort of exploded over the last forty-eight hours, an oasis in the desert. Until recently we had to work with what we had, which wasn’t much. First there was the hood-in-the-forest. Then the standing-on-a-hill. The smiling-through-the-cafe-window. The cloaked-magical-elf-with-wand. And now, the glass ceiling – that winsome smile to camera, accompanied by “Whoops”.

“WHAT SORT OF ATTITUDE IS THAT?” complained one fan. “IT’S LIKE SHE JUST DOESN’T CARE ABOUT THE SHOW OR SOMETHING.” There is only one response to this sort of thing, but it’s sadly unprintable.

Anyway. Doctors: Assemble.

I made the mistake of asking what the collective term for Whittakers might be, and more than one person replied “An Agenda of Whittakers”. Sigh.

But look, while we’re at it –

You will have your own. Leave them in the comments box, along with your collective hatred.

And then earlier this week we had that new wallpaper, which you’ll have seen by now, and which looks lovely, although it doesn’t feature nearly enough people standing around gazing in wonder and alarm.

It was my old friend Rachel who pointed out that there are patterns to this sort of thing. “I’ve never noticed before how many of the Doctor Who promo photos involve crouching,” she said. “I hope the Tardis does knee replacements.” She’s right. They look like they’re examining a corpse or something. “Scully. C’mere and take a look at this.”

And then there was the trailer, which featured a lot of running, and wide stares, and a cryptic farewell kiss blown across a white room, as the Doctor goes to what looks like her death. People have dedicated reams to its deconstruction and we don’t have time this morning – besides there is nothing new to add. I sort of liked it, I suppose. Could have done without the music, but there is a nice ensemble feel to the whole thing, the concept of family. It’s been a while since we’ve had that vibe in the TARDIS – 1967, really, although the Pertwee years came close.

But Doctor Who hasn’t been the only enduring British franchise graced with a new trailer this week: Mary Poppins Returns got one as well. We all know that Mary Poppins is a Time Lord, of course, given her love of hats, umbrellas, her ability to speak dog and the bag that’s bigger on the inside, but an exclusive leaked scene shows the connections run right through to the core.

Hurrah! It’s Mindfulness Day, folks, whatever that is. Supposedly it’s a day to promote mindfulness – the concept of being focused on the here and now and being mindful of what you’re doing, which is something that happens less these days than we’d like to hope it dows. Mindful eating, for example, is tasting every mouthful, concentrating on the food as it passes over the teeth and across the taste nerves and down the back of the throat as it is chewed and swallowed. Mindful breathing is tantamount to meditation. At my son’s school they do mindful reading, or as I call it, ‘reading’.

We’ve briefly discussed mindfulness before – last time was a nod to the Ladybird books, and I really ought to think about doing a part two for that at some point. Today we’re going to talk about genuine mindfulness, and thus I have assembled a selection of quotes and mantras and Advice For Living, from a variety of sources. And I’ve married them with images from Doctor Who. All entirely appropriate and not at all silly. Honest, guv.

In the British press, there is fallout from Donald Trump’s faux pas when meeting the Queen.

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Elsewhere, National Beard Day passes without incident, beyond a couple of paradoxes.

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In soaps, there is general panic in Holby City when John Gaskell seems about to regenerate.

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A leaked still revealing Matt Smith’s role in the new Star Wars film terrorises the internet.

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And the absence of any official confirmed Series 11 air date is clearly getting to some of the fans.

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And finally: I wanted to test out my new phone camera, and so I did a picture of the Twelfth Doctor and Peri exploring the undergrowth near an abandoned National Trust property, with Spider-Man, the Brigadier and two of the Lord of the Rings fellowship, unaware that they’re about to be attacked by a giant banana riding a space hopper.